How do I fix this mess…
I wanted to rage. I was so angry, and I’d been keeping it inside me for so long. All the sources of my fury, all the people who’d caused it, they were my guests. They’d lied to me, they’d appealed to my kindness and then taken advantage of it, they’d insulted me, they’d treated me like I was an idiot, and they’d tried to murder me. It was my duty to keep them safe. It was the very essence of who I was, but universe help me, I wanted to collapse the inn on top of them and bury them. It would make me happy.
A pressure built in my chest, a dense, insistent ache. A tear wet my cheek, made of distilled stress. I fought it back, but the pressure ground on me from the inside. I was ready to burst. Either I cried now or I forced it down, which meant I would have to cry later, probably at exactly the wrong moment.
I was alone. Nobody would hear.
I took a deep, shuddering breath and let it go. The dam inside me broke. All my stress and pain came out with the flood of tears. I cried and cried, and my sobs sounded like snarls. I cried because I didn’t know what to do, because I’d almost died, because the anger inside me tore at my soul, because Sean had sacrificed himself for me, and because I wanted my parents to hug me.
Gradually my sobs began to die down. I felt tired but light. My head was clear.
A thin tendril slid out of the wall and brushed my cheek. I looked at it. A tiny white bud formed on the tip of the thin branch and opened into a little star of a flower with tiny turquoise stamens in the middle. A faint, honey-sweet aroma drifted up.
The poor inn was trying to make me feel better.
I inhaled the aroma. It washed through me, sweet and delicate. That’s right. I was an innkeeper. I had seen the universe and survived it. I would survive this too. I would fix this.
I stroked the branch with my fingers and whispered, “Thank you.”
If only all of them were as sensitive as Gertrude Hunt. The inn always felt what I felt…
It hit me like a freight train. George, you bastard. You conniving, manipulating bastard.
He knew. The Arbitrators’ database was one of the most comprehensive in the entire galaxy. He did his research, figured it out, and then he set about finding an innkeeper he could manipulate into doing it. He must’ve approached some of us straight on, which is why everyone turned him down. No innkeeper would do this unless their back was against the wall, and mine was.
Hell, he told me exactly what he intended to do during our very first conversation at the inn. I just hadn’t understood it. He’d laid it out and now it all made sense.
Was Gertrude Hunt even strong enough? Was I strong enough?
I needed information. I had only seen it done once in my whole life, and that was when my mother used our inn to get a murderer to confess. There had to have been others. I got up and went down into my lab.
Two hours later, I had my answers. The good news was that Gertrude Hunt was definitely powerful enough to handle it. The inn’s roots were deep. It was possible. But it would have to go through me. I was the weakest link in this chain. As long as I held up long enough, it was possible. My books didn’t cover the past eighty years, but they did reach back three centuries from that point. The bad news was that four out of six innkeepers who’d tried it during that time went mad in the process.
Lousy odds.
I tried desperately to find another way. Any other way at all. I came up empty. It was this or failure.
If I did it, I would have to do it fast. The otrokars would leave tomorrow evening, and everything had to be ready by then. All of my guests would actively resist it too. All the favors I’d collected wouldn’t be enough. I had to restore my influence and authority as an innkeeper, or they would never submit to the process. Right now I was an innkeeper who’d been poisoned in my own inn, like a bartender who got his ass kicked in his own bar. I had to solve my own poisoning, hit them with it fast, and then dump the rest on them before they had a chance to really think about the possible consequences.
The identity of the poisoner wasn’t the problem. I could assemble all the Merchants together, turn out the lights, and the guilty party would light up like a Christmas tree. But that wasn’t impressive. I had to figure out who had done it and why so the big reveal would be an icing on the cake.
Twenty-one centuries ago Lucius Cassius, censor and consul of Rome, had asked, “Cui bono?” To whose benefit? Every crime had come to pass because someone had something to gain by it, whether it was money, fame, or emotional satisfaction. I had to figure out who would benefit from my death.
I found a pen and a piece of paper and began writing my thoughts down.
Guests who wanted peace had nothing to gain. If I died, the negotiations would end. This included the Arbitrator. His ultimate goal was peace as well.
Guests who wanted war had nothing to gain either. The negotiations were in shambles as it was, and my death, while it definitely would put a final nail in the coffin of peace talks, carried risks. It would be investigated, and the guilty party would be barred from Earth. Why risk it when the summit had broken down so completely?
The Holy Anocracy had no reason to want me dead. First, Arland and Lady Isur liked me. I was an instrument of Robart’s punishment shortly after his arrival, but he had much bigger concerns right now. I wasn’t directly involved in the brawl that took place in the dining hall either.
The otrokars owed me a favor, but it wasn’t enough of a burden to risk my death, especially not so obviously, by serving me tea. Not to mention that sharing tea was a sacred tradition. Poisoning it spat on one of the cornerstones of their society.
The Merchants owed me a favor too, and more importantly, they wanted Sean to sign away his life. But Nuan Cee had no way of knowing that Sean would offer to trade his life for mine. We’d had no contact in the past six months, except for that one time at Wilmos’s shop. Sean never reached out to me, never sent me any letters, and never expressed any feelings for me. The only way Nuan Cee would be aware of Sean’s possible motive for sacrifice would be if Sean told him that he cared for me. I hadn’t known Sean for very long, but the few days that we did spend together put us through a pressure cooker and I knew him well. Sean wouldn’t share his feelings. If he truly loved me, he would keep it secret.
I stopped and squeezed my eyes shut. Sean Evans had traded his life for mine. That probably meant he loved me. Okay, I would have to deal with that later. Not now. Now I had to save him.
I looked at my paper. Unless Sean confessed his love for me to Nuan Cee in a heart-to-heart talk—and Sean just wasn’t that kind of a guy—the Merchant had nothing to gain through my death. Even if Sean had betrayed his feelings somehow, there still wasn’t any guarantee that putting me in danger would get the Merchants their lifetime contract. If I did die and the Merchants’ involvement was discovered, the Nuan family would be barred from Earth, and that was a hefty price tag. Killing me simply didn’t make financial sense.
I stared at my paper. Nobody had anything to gain from my dying. I was an innkeeper, a neutral party. It’s not like I was some criminal mastermind or a former tyrant with a constellation of bounties on my head…
Oh.
Well. That made complete sense.
I walked into the kitchen wearing my innkeeper robe. Beast shot out from under the table and bounced around my feet. She must’ve abandoned Sean, because he was alone in his room. Orro slumped motionless in his chair. He saw me, and then my world turned dark and furry, and powerful limbs squeezed all the air out of my lungs.